Philosophy Minor

Basic philosophical problems suggested by everyday experience integrated into a coherent philosophy of life through comparison with solutions offered by prominent philosophers. TBR Common Course: PHIL 1030

TBC: Creativity and Cultural Expression (Discovery)

Principles of deductive and inductive reasoning, problem solving, and the analysis of arguments in everyday language.

TBC: Human Society and Social Relationships (Explorations)

Readings, discussions, and activities associated with history and philosophy of science and mathematics.

Examines major ethical theories, the moral nature of human beings, and the meaning of good and right and applies ethical theories to resolving moral problems in personal and professional lives.  

Examines the concept of human happiness and its application in everyday living as discussed since antiquity by philosophers, psychologists, writers, spiritual leaders, and contributors to popular culture.

Exposes students to the fundamentals of ethical theory and familiarizes them with some of the practical, ethical, and legal issues with which they would have to deal as computer scientists.

The origins, development, essence, and implications of leading philosophical-religious traditions originating in Asia.

Examines issues of religious experience, religious knowledge, faith and reason, the existence and nature of God, evil, religious diversity, life after death.

Examines various philosophical perspectives on atheism, understood as the belief that no transcendent creator deity exists, and that there are no supernatural causes of natural events. Compares and contrasts this belief with familiar alternatives (including theism, agnosticism, and humanism), considers the spiritual significance of atheism, and explores implications for ethics and religion.

Examines the relation of humans to the rest of nature, clarifying the relevant ethical issues and exploring from various perspectives their application to present and future ecological concerns.

Explores ethical issues arising from the practice of medical therapeutics, from the development of new biomedical technologies, and more largely from reflections on life's meaning and prospects in the face of changing modalities of intervention fostered particularly by the various life sciences.

Explores the living legacy of ancient peripatetic pedagogy as expressed in American Pragmatist and British Empiricist philosophies of experience.

Examines sociopolitical and existential concerns of African Americans, especially in respect to issues of justice, equality, and the very meaning of life in a world of anti-black racism, against the backdrop of "enlightenment" philosophical discourse on race and personhood.

Examination of the cinematic expression of philosophical issues and development of philosophical issues in cinema.

The main problems of social philosophy are surveyed: the distinctive nature of social reality and the nature of social knowledge and how they relate to value theory.

Prerequisite: PHIL 1030 or permission of instructor. The development of philosophical thought from Thales to Occam. Offered fall only.

The development of philosophical thought from Hobbes to Hegel. Offered spring only.

Emphasis on movements such as German idealism, the rise of the philosophy of the social sciences, historical materialism, utilitarianism, and early critiques of modernism.

The nature of art, aesthetic experience, and artistic creation.

Explores philosophical questions about literature, philosophical themes in literature, and differing assessments of the relation of philosophical to literary texts.

The nature and methods of formal deductive logic, truth functional logic, quantification theory, identity relations, propositional calculus.

The nature, significance, and application of the teachings of several outstanding existential thinkers.

The critical examination of various movements and key figures in recent European philosophy.

Examines major work in contemporary feminist philosophy and feminist theory, with particular emphasis on the relation of sex and gender, feminist accounts of inquiry, feminist ethical issues, and feminist aesthetics.  

Development of American thought with emphasis on naturalism, idealism, and pragmatism.

Prerequisite: PHIL 2110 recommended. Introduces students to the most influential analyses of meaning, reference, and truth of early twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy; explores how the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein transforms canonical accounts of language; considers the role of metaphor in human communication and understanding.

Examines twentieth-century analytic movement including logical atomism, logical positivism, indeterminacy semantics, ordinary language philosophy.

An examination of the development of Marxist philosophy up to and including the present.

The methods, problems, and presuppositions of scientific inquiry.

Classical philosophy of mind (emphases: the mind-body problem, theories of consciousness) and contemporary applications of philosophy to psychology (emphases: logic and cognition, emotion and reason, artificial intelligence).

Examines issues in both traditional philosophies of music and contemporary philosophies of music making and musical perception.

Nature of historical knowledge and problems of historical inquiry; meaning and value of history; reality of the past; historical determinism and human freedom.

Prerequisite: Permission of instructor. Directed study concerning a particular philosophical problem or thinker.